A Reporter's World:
Passions, Places, and People

Wally Gordon

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Perfect bound, 355 pages, 5-1/2" x 8-1/2" 
ISBN 978-1-938288-04-3
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ISBN 978-1-938288-05-0

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About the Book

This career-spanning compilation from one of our era’s most insightful and thoughtful journalists is a must-read for anyone seeking engagement in and understanding of the varied world around us.

The stories Gordon has covered span the planet, from tales conveying the grand sweep of history to others delving deep into the mysteries of the human heart. His unique personal style captures the events he was witness to as well as the challenges and conundrums they brought him as an engaged reporter.

“As both a journalist and an individual,” he writes, “I have seldom felt I was controlling events . . . . But I have tried to observe them carefully, understand their meaning and merit, convey them clearly for my readers in ways that touch their own lives, and finally, with whatever experience and wisdom and craft I could bring to bear, relate them to what I am.”

Preview

Dancing on the Waves

The narrow road heading west toward the Pacific Ocean has no sign indicating anything of interest, and to turn into it requires an awkward 120-degree swerve into dense forest. The road winds for two miles through redwoods and oaks, alongside fields where horses graze, past vacation shacks, modest houses, and small farms before dead-ending.

At the end of the road is a sign for the beach preserve and a booth where a U.S. Forest Service employee demands $5. This is an isolated enclave of Los Padres National Forest.

The beach is long and wide and wild, perhaps the wildest anywhere on one of the wildest stretches of the Pacific Coast. Enormous boulders, some of them a couple of hundred feet high, erupt from the sand and out of the offshore ocean. Fierce waves smash against the rocks and surge in the gaps between them.

Signs warn that even wading at the edge of the ocean could be fatal, and that huge, unexpected waves can come from nowhere and sweep away the unwary.

The spectacle of beach and ocean, violent waves and barren rock, is engrossing. My wife and I walked the length of the beach. Ignoring the signs, we waded in the bitterly cold shallow water. After a few seconds, our feet began to ache from the cold. Then we sat and just gazed.

In a while, we noticed a sleek, black object far out where the largest waves were breaking into mountains of foam. The object resembled the seals we had seen all along the coast, or the dolphins cavorting farther south.

The object was playful: diving, floating, swimming, and riding the waves.

It wasn’t a seal or a dolphin but a person. Slowly, we perceived details. It was a slight figure, a slender young woman with long blonde hair down her back. She had no surfboard, no flippers, and no goggles. All that protected her from the ferocious elements was her wetsuit.

For half an hour, she played in the waves. She took her time. She rode them in for a ways, then dove beneath them and swam back out. She was tossed around by them, inundated. She swam parallel to the beach just beyond the breaking waves, then allowed them to carry her back into their foaming ferocity.

She was dancing on the waves.

I had never seen anything like it.

Swimming in such water is not like other kinds of physical challenge, climbing a mountain or skiing down it, running a marathon or jumping out of an airplane. In those activities, the challenge is predictable, foreseeable. You know what you are going to face. It is the same from one moment to the next, one time to the next.

But who can predict the next wave, the spot with an undertow or a whirlpool, the fish in the sea, and the force of gigantic amounts of water smashing you in the face? Such an ocean is always different, always unknown. Perhaps the closest parallel is riding a bull, except that that ordeal lasts for only eight seconds, not half an hour.

Later, I talked briefly with the woman. She lived here. She loved the water and swam often in the cold and rough ocean. Yes, she said, there had been a couple of moments today when she was afraid, but that wasn’t important. It was a small thing.

This scene took place near the campgrounds of Big Sur in California, a few miles south of the mansions of the Monterey Peninsula. Like most good things in the world, however, this gem is hidden, off the highway and without benefit of signs or directions.

The mornings in Big Sur are cool, even in the middle of summer, and the entire world snuggles beneath a deep blanket of fog. Slowly, as the sun warms the land, the fog disperses and the afternoons are calm and brilliant, with sun casting a startling radiance over a region that has remained almost unaltered since I first saw it fifty years ago.

It is the kind of land and sea, the kind of vision that gives you a morsel of hope for this troubled country, lamed by its futile politics and misguided public policies, dragging itself, and perhaps the world with it, into a deepening morass of climate change, political stalemate, and economic frustration.

The hopeful vision of that entire coast—of my entire life, of why I have written nearly every day for more than fifty years—was embodied for me in the vision of that slender young woman dancing on the waves. Without defenses, without protection, alone, she faced, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “all that fortune, death, and danger dare.”

She seemed to me to prove, just by being herself, that hope remains for us.

The Trouble With Compassion

In the past week, I became aware of hard times that three of my friends have fallen upon. They are very different people with very different kinds of problems, but what they have in common is this:

Something small went wrong, the kind of mistake we all make, falling in love with the wrong person, making a bad business decision, having an accident; then that problem led to another and another until their whole lives threatened to unravel. And this: I felt their pain; I offered compassion; I did nothing to help.

Many of us—a lot more than we would like to admit—live on the lip of a precipice, and it takes ridiculously little to push us over the rim into the canyon bottom. This is not a country with much in the way of security to undergird our lives. Most of us live with inadequate health insurance, if we have any at all, send our children to inadequate schools, and spend our lives negotiating accident-prone highways. Most of our relationships, our marriages and loves, our families and friendships, are tenuous, forever at the mercy of the shifting sands of emotions that we understand little and control less.

And when one strand of our lives frays, then all the other strands become vulnerable.

For those who are sensitive and think of themselves as good people, the answer all too often is compassion. Compassion is pity, sympathy. It was what I offered my friends. It is Bill Clinton’s I-can-feel-your-pain. It is George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. And it is hopelessly inadequate.

At the national as at the personal level, we need more than compassion. Compassion will not get the aching veteran the medical care he needs; it will not get the hungry child the food she craves; it will not find the homeless family a house; it will not solve the dilemma of the pregnant child.

We need to be able to do more for our friends than say, “I’m sorry,” and our government needs to be able to do more than that for the citizens of the world’s wealthiest nation.

When Franklin Roosevelt confronted the worst economic pain the country has ever known, he did not say he felt the pain, and he did not offer compassionate liberalism. He said he saw one-third of a nation ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ill-housed, and he was going to do something about it. And he did.

Compassion and feeling-your-pain are not action; they are substitutes for it. After failing in his first two years with real programs, Clinton turned in his final six years to I-can-feel-your-pain. His mantra became think small. When Bush came to power, the words of the mantra changed but not the message; now it was compassion, which, like feeling your pain, never put food on any poor man’s table.

I, for one, am sick of compassion. I am sick of my own inability to do anything real to help my friends, and of my government’s inability to do anything real to help its citizens. Pity is a poor substitute for policy. Compassion is a watery gruel that is intended to fool people into thinking they are receiving real sustenance.

It Should Have Been Raining When She Died

Friday afternoon was warm, sunny, and brilliant below a cloudlessly blue New Mexico sky. But if this had been a movie, it would have been raining.

Our family had a dog named Flash. She was part of our lives for nearly fourteen years. She slept in our bedroom, walked with us every day, went on every trip we took, hiked, and even skied with us (trying to freeload by standing on the backs of our skies). She never boarded in a kennel a day in her life. Almost my first action every morning was to serve her breakfast, and almost the last of our day to put her outside and then bring her back in. When we camped, she slept in the tent on our legs.

She protected us from bears and mountain lions and immigrants jogging across the border from Mexico as we lay unprotected on the open ground.

She was, simply, a part of our lives, a life within our lives.

Two weeks ago, she started to fail. She could hardly walk, she was in pain, she could never get comfortable, she lost interest in eating and almost everything else. We took her to the vet who had cared for her all her life, and she gave us steroid pills to relieve pain caused by calcification of her spine. After a day’s surcease, Flash relapsed and became worse.

Friday afternoon under the New Mexico sun, my wife, my son, and I took her back to the vet for the last time. They had prepared a room for us with a comfortable mat for Flash, low lights, peace, and privacy. The vet, Barbara, gave Flash an injection to relax her, and then ten minutes later a large dose of an anesthetic. As we held and caressed her, she relaxed completely for the first time in ten days. A minute later, she stopped breathing.

It was death with dignity. Go gentle into that good night: These were the words my wife and I both misquoted from Dylan Thomas.

We drove home, somber, sad, shedding a few tears. We packed up her food and other things and gave them to a friend. We didn’t talk much. We were drained emotionally as well as physically.

But I was restless. As the sun slipped toward the mountain ridge to the west, I went for a walk in the forest. For nearly fourteen years, Flash would have accompanied me. Now I was alone. I headed for a place we informally call Sunset Rock, where there is a beautiful view from the edge of a ravine across a vista of mountains and woods. But the Forest Service had deliberately allowed the trail to disintegrate, and I could no longer find it; had Flash been with me, she would, I believe, have led me there.

As I walked, I cried, not a few seeping tears as earlier but a balling, full-throated scream of pain. I yelled and I cursed. I could not get out of my head other words from the same Thomas poem: Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I raged alone in the woods, as I still do achingly as I write this.

But what is this rage? Flash had a good, full, and long life and a peaceful, dignified, painless death. What more could I wish for any being?

And then I realized that my mourning, like much mourning, was selfish. I was mourning for myself, for the gaping hole left in my life by the death of a living being that I loved and who helped fill my life with good things. But I realized, too, that in mourning, I was also honoring Flash, honoring what she had meant to me, what she had contributed to the world of which I was a part.

And finally I realized that this thought, too, was accompanying my mourning for Flash: The society in which I live will do all in its power to prevent me, when my time comes, from having a death as dignified, loving, serene, and humane as the one we gave Flash, for, strange as it sounds, our parting gift to her was in the way of her death.

About the Author

Wally Gordon has been a writer and editor for newspapers and magazines for more than fifty years, beginning with a summer job at the New York Times when he was sixteen years old. Since then, his career has carried him to all fifty states and more than sixty foreign countries. He wrote a novel in Spain, edited a newspaper in American Samoa, taught at a university in West Africa, and served in the U.S. Army in Iran.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, he has a diploma from Philips Exeter Academy and a degree in history from Brown University, and has done graduate work in politics and government at Columbia, George Washington, and American universities.

After a decade at the Baltimore Sun, including a stint as Washington Bureau manager, in 1978 he moved to New Mexico, which has been his home ever since.

In 1999, he founded The Independent, a weekly newspaper based in Edgewood, N.M., and serving the three-county area east of Albuquerque. Four members of the staff purchased the paper in 2010. He continues to write his column, “Mountain Musing,” for the newspaper every week. Many of the pieces in this volume began life as his newspaper columns.

He lives in the Manzanita Mountains of central New Mexico with photographer and French teacher Thelma Bowles, his wife of 27 years. They have one son, Sergei.

Praise for
A Reporter's World

Wally Gordon combines his fifty years of experience as a reporter with the intellectual generosity and humility to bring it home for the readers.
—Ty Belknap,
editor and publisher
__________

A unique perspective on journalism. Wally has the gift of bringing out the heart and soul of the issues and the contrasting players involved. It was always refreshing to know that his interviews with me would be reported in a totally unbiased manner (and that he probably knew more about the topic than I did).
—N.M. State Senator
Sue Wilson Beffort
__________

Conventional wisdom has it that collections of newspaper writing don’t hold up well over time. Wally Gordon’s work—fifty years of it—is the exception that proves conventional wisdom isn’t always so wise.
—Jim Belshaw,
veteran New Mexico columnist
__________

A fascinating glimpse into a well-traveled life examined through a reporter’s inquisitive eye. Wally Gordon’s book spans the globe and many of the defining moments of American culture. Thoughtful, emotional, and personal, this collection of columns and articles provides a penetrating analysis of the human condition.
—Leota Harriman,
editor